Co-founder of Blue Rocket Productions, David Gurney, has warned the KANZ Broadband Summit that television audiences are slipping away into social media, gaming or any other online subscription spaces.
Gurney said consumers are moving from free-to-air channel loyalty to brand loyalty and spend an average of 21 hours a week in the online arena, and that doesn’t leave a lot of time for television.
Online sites such as YouTube commoditise content and contest people in the business of creating products to earn revenue for investors.
This leaves broadcasters with less money for commissioning, which results in offering audiences less.
“There are people out there who are busting themselves to make something and put it on YouTube not to make any revenue or for anything other than the glory of getting half a million views. There are 13 hours of video being uploaded to YouTube every minute – that is a challenging thing,” he said.
Gurney said this is a critical impact for the decline of the television arena as advertisers are pulling their money from television and putting it online.
“In TV, 50 per cent of your advertising dollar is wasted [whereas in online] they can quantify the results through the extraction of metadata,” he said.
Not only is the interactive space gaining ground, it is also causing television to be an increasingly fragmented market. Content producers are constantly looking for ways to monetise it.
The old gatekeepers – broadcasters, distributors and cable operators - are the ones facing the challenges from the online space unlike the new gatekeepers - telcos, product manufacturers and brand owners - who have not come from the traditional television or film-making backgrounds.
Gurney said the challenge arises as it is often becoming difficult to tell the difference between the true innovators and people who are really good at marketing.
As such, content providers are constructing brand loyalty and aiming at linking content with technology to give audiences a compelling offering.
“I think that the future, particularly with faster broadband, will enable us to exchange ideas very rapidly and seamlessly integrate with international partners,” he said.
Content providers are also excited about cloud technology as their objective is to create a multi-platform branded offering.
They plan to add value to primary offering ties by bringing different cross-platform elements together and giving audiences a very compelling experience to engage them for as long as possible – with reduced budgets.
“Anybody [running] any substantial service systems is looking forward to a day when it’s all handled by Microsoft or Google or somebody that you don’t have to worry about and the key is the seamless collaboration,” Gurney said.
